Well, actually they can change.... I'm pretty sure my right retina is considerably different today than it was before 2010, when I had radiation and laser treatment for a tumor. Likewise, people can burn their fingers, altering the fingerprints with scar tissue.

Certs are certainly the way to go. What is needed is a way to be able to carry them on you at all times (implant perhaps?), while being able to update it and offer up public information on demand. The downside of this is a loss of anonymity. We already have paranoid people who rant about RFID tracking using our money.

By sheer coincidence, Best Korea's IT chief just got a shiny CD in the post of Ray Charles' Friendship album and played it just prior to the internet going down.

FTFA: 21st Century Fox had blocked access to the two networks ... Dish prematurely ceased distribution of Fox News

So each one is blaming the other...

I don't know... I find it odd that the WD drives, at the 5400rpm speed, were able to write data faster than the 7200rpm Seagate drives. That seems counter-intuitive.

It's also nice to see all of the drives go through that sort of "punishment" without a single failure - out of the box. NewEgg reviews aren't terribly helpful, since most only leave reviews when they have issues, and only a few customers ever bother to leave good reviews unless they are overwhelmed by the quality of a product.

As the other person said, I'm not against cultures, just that it's a bad reason to isolate segments of humanity into ghettos of language.

Plenty of people commemorate their cultural heritage without demanding exclusive use of the language. They are separate things, but too easily confused by more short-sighted, prideful people (the Quebecois and French are a good example of this). I suspect this is more rooted in our hard-wired tendency toward xenophobia (i.e. fear of things 'unfamiliar').

As I also stated, they could choose Esperanto or Spanish... just pick something and stick with that as a language. It is rather ridiculous that software can get hung up on localization... it's a huge waste of resources, both in development, as well as in the bandwidth/storage used.

A great example are some of the latest games that came out, like Watch_Dogs, that ran 50GB just to localize all of the audio in the game for hundreds of languages. It's nice if you are Khazak, but the effort and resources are disproportional to whatever has been gained.

Lastly, I'll also add that 'Murica has had no problem exporting its culture through movies and games, even when they are dubbed in other languages. Clearly that has little to nothing to do with the heart of a culture.

If the article about communicating with animals at a conversational level is published, the information will be translated into English.

Seriously, though, why do we still speak hundreds of languages? - I know... because culture! Culture is a lousy, empty, truly vapid reason. A large percentage of the human race's information is in English, a flawed, but serviceable (and malleable) trade language that served the British well for several centuries. As the study pointed out, English is, far and above all others, a global language.

It's a shame that it will likely be centuries before mankind figures out how to be more informationally efficient and come up with some sort of "basic" language. I'd even go along with Esperanto if the powers that be would just pick something and move the human race to it.

Come on, Apple, when are we going to see our 5" 8K displays? Imagine how clear that will be!!

For all budget discussions, any program, should always couch the monetary amounts in terms of how many F-35s it equates to.

This guy has been around for a while, I used to talk to him way back in the day, seemed pretty smart.

To clarify.... I know this is Sony Pictures, but if the hack was this invasive into Sony's IT infrastructure, it's very possible they penetrated the entire Sony network.

All we are seeing at the moment is from Sony Pictures, but we may see a lot more in the next few weeks.

How long before we see Sony's flagship console jailbroken like the PS3?

For that matter... we'll probably see the PS3's keys brought up to the current version, as well.

For a $500 computer, it would be a $40 UPS. That said what is your data worth? What is your time (involved in setting up the PC and installing apps)?

Also, a UPS isn't just about protecting against the damaging severe spikes and surges or outages - I used to live in an apartment and had all sorts of mysterious reboots and lockups until I attached through a cheap UPS. I took the same experience to heart with my job at the time, as an embedded systems engineer - we had a troublesome installation that had the panel rebooting constantly in the factory - all the while, the plant electrician insisted the power line to the panel was a conditioned line that was a rock solid waveform, but only after attaching the UPS to one of our panels, and having it perform perfectly for 3 days, was he convinced that all his fancy diagnostic tools might have been lying to him. After putting UPSes on all of our panels, all the problems disappeared. My next visit to that plant, and ALL of the control panels they had in the plant had UPSes inline.

The headline rephrased for truth:

AT&T confirms its future business plans depended on being able to double-dip subscribers AND content providers for payments.

or perhaps with the correct context:

AT&T confirms its future business plans depended on being able to shake down content providers for bandwidth subscribers already pay for.

High latency is right. Back around 1999 I got sick of waiting for Charter to flip the switch on broadband and got Echostar/Dish 2-way. My ping times were around 800ms for the trip to satellites 22,000 miles out. Luckily, I only had to deal with it for a year.

Cranking up a multiplayer game of Serious Sam with my son on our LAN was funny though... the games would appear on the internet, and people would try and join. Satellite wasn't conducive to multiplayer games, for sure.

There is no dark matter... it's a glitch in the machine.

That's not a bad thing; a glitch can be exploited.